with Mary Lyster, and
reopened in his nature all the old founts of passion and of storm. It
had been her sovereign will that he should love her; it had been
achieved. For her sake--knowing himself for the seared and criminal
being that he was--for Ashe's sake--he had tried to resist her spell. In
vain. A fatal fusion of their two natures--imaginations--sympathies--had
come about. Each was interpenetrated by the other; and retreat was
impossible.

A kind of sombre power, indeed--the power of the poet and the
dreamer--seemed to have spoken from Cliffe's strange wooing. He had
taken no particular pains to flatter her, or to conceal his original
hesitation. He put her own action in a hard, almost a brutal light. It
was plain that he thought she had treated her husband badly; that he
warned her of a future of treachery and remorse. At the same time he let
her see that he could not doubt but that she would face it. They still
had the last justifying cards in their hands--passion, and the courage
to go where passion leads. When those were played, they might look each
other and the world in the face. Till then they were but triflers--mean
souls--fit neither for heaven nor for hell.

Ashe's whole being was soon in a tumult of rage under the sting of this
report, as he was able to piece it out from Kitty. But he kept his
self-command, and by dint of it he presently arrived at some notion of
her own share in the scene. Horror, recoil, disavowal--a wild resentment
of the charges heaped upon her, of the pitiless interpretation of her
behavior which broke from those harsh lips, of the incredulity passing
into something like contempt with which Cliffe had endured her wrath and
received her protestations--then a blind flight through the fields to
the little wayside station, where she hoped to catch the last train;
the arrival and departure of the train while she was still half a mile
from the line, and her shelter at a cottage for the night; these things
stood out plainly, whatever else remained in obscurity. How far she had
provoked her own fate, and how far even now she was delivered from the
morbid spell of Cliffe's personality, Ashe would not allow himself to
ask. As she neared the end of her story, it was as though the great
tempest wave in which she had been struggling died down, and with a
merciful rush bore him to a shore of deliverance. She was there beside
him; and she was still his own.

He had been leaning over the side